Facilitating my first Open Space Meeting
In June, my teams, along with two other groups, gathered at our office in Santa Barbara. Instead of having the leadership team present yet another slide deck, I hosted an Open Space Meeting for 100 people in product development at AppFolio, Inc.!
As someone who values meeting culture and facilitation, it was really important to me to have people actively participating during the 2 day in-person event.
Open Space is a participant-driven meeting style where the attendees collectively create the agenda around the given theme at the start of the meeting. Our theme was “How can our group be greater than the sum of its parts?”
At AppFolio, one of the core values is 'Great People make a Great Company,' and this event provided an opportunity for these great individuals to discuss what mattered most to them. It was an incredible occasion to foster collaboration, innovation, and the exchange of ideas among our talented teams.
How I organized things:
This meeting style lends itself to in-person groups. It can be recreated on zoom. I would not recommend a hybrid experience as that would lessen the experience for both online and in-person. For example, people would be less likely to speak up when having to pass around a mic. So for this event, I held two session. One in-person and a separate one online for remote attendees.
There ended up only being 12 people remote, which was not quite enough for the Open Space format.
There were three 30 minute time blocks with 5 meeting rooms reserved making for a total of 15 discussion topics over 2 days.
With 100 people, I could have had more breakout rooms/topics. Now that people understand the format, I can plan for that next time.
I started to tell people about the meeting a month beforehand. You shouldn’t do too much advanced prep. However, engineers can be a bit shy; so, I wanted to give people time to understand the format and ask questions.
One of the principles of Open Space is “Whatever happens is the only thing the could have.” No one can predict what is going to happen. I spent a lot of time calming leadership’s anxiety and accept that we wouldn’t be able to predict what was going to be discussed or what would come out of the two days.
My only measure of success was if people had fun and leaned into the idea. We succeeded on all fronts!
It has a very structured 45 minute opening circle to talk through the Open Space principles, had everyone introduce themselves to 2 people they didn’t already know, explained the responsibilities of proposing, and opened up the marketplace for topics.
I made sure people knew that proposing a topic wasn’t about being an expert. It was about being curious enough to talk about the topic. Great discussions can start with a simple question.
I had a very informal 30 minute closing circle. I prepared some general questions like “What is one thing you learned?” By then, the attendees were engaged and led the conversation.
References:
Questions about this? Interested in organizing your own Open Space?
